H1 courses - thoughts

15.980 (Organizing For Innovative Product Development)
Professor Tom Allen calls himself the Chief entertainer and he more than lived up to his reputation. The class dealt with knowledge transfer, knowledge gatekeepers, relationships between distance and communication, dual ladder approach and matrix organization and how the knowledge of these things and tweaking it the right way will help product innovation. There is no one right answer but based on your circumstances and the knowledge of the above factors you might be able to make a difference. This concepts taught in this course will help me sometime in the future but for now it did make me more aware of my current surroundings and organizational structure. The course had recommended readings every week and in the final week we had to write a paper and give a presentation on one of the topics taught in the class

15.969 (User-Centered Innovation in the Internet Age)
Professor Eric Von Hippel is well know for developing the concept of user innovation. He introduced the lead user method that can be used to systematically learn about user innovation in order to apply it in new product development. The class also talks about toolkits for facilitating lead user innovation, corporate resistance to user innovation, open source community and how companies make money from open source. The 6 guest lecturers we had also added to the course experience. This course had recommended readings and 2 papers due at the end of the term. One paper focused on PDP and the other paper could be on any one of the topics taught in class. It was a fun course. The 2 papers help a lot in getting a deeper understanding of the course.

There is one thing I would like to see both of these courses do. A sizable portion of the class grade should include class participation. This will get everyone involved instead of a few and get all the students to read the recommended readings. As Professor Ed Crawley would agree an incentive based system works.